Tuesday, September 26, 2017

The Paradox of High Performance Cultures

'Creating a high-performance culture' is a phrase that
adorns many a corporate presentation, made by both Business and HR Leaders. Once you have spoken about whatever else you wanted to say about your
business strategy and plan adding this magic phrase, 'creating a high-performance
culture', seem to give it a nice 'human touch' and demonstrates your commitment to
facilitating the unfolding of human potential in your organization!

So, what is the problem? Just because something looks good
on PowerPoint slides, we can’t assume that it won’t work in real life. The
problem begins when we start asking questions. Is there really something like a
high-performance culture? Does it remain constant across organizations? Is it a
naturally occurring phenomenon or is it something that can be created? If it
can be created, what kind of creation is required? Once created, can it
be sustained? It is when we try to answer these questions we come to the
paradox mentioned in the title of this discussion.

An issue becomes a paradox when there are multiple opinions the
issue, each of which appears to be true, but they seem to be in conflict with
one another. In this discussion, we will look at the various perspectives
that exist regarding high-performance cultures and try to make some sense out
of them. Let’s start with some of the
perspectives:

High-performance
culture is the ultimate source of competitive advantage and hence developing a
high-performance culture should be given the highest priority

High-performance
culture is just a fad. It sounds good. But it is very difficult to bring it
down to specifics and impossible to implement. It is just something that has
been invented in retrospect to explain the success of some high-performing
groups

Culture
is a characteristic of a group whereas high-performance is an outcome that
depends on multiple factors. So it is misleading to speak about
high-performance work cultures. One should instead speak about high-performance
work systems

There
is no one culture that leads to high-performance

There
are cultural traits leading to high-performance that hold good across
organizations

We can
define a target high-performance culture and create it in a short period of
time

Culture
is something that evolves over a period of time and deepest levels of culture
consist of unconscious assumptions. It is not something that be ‘copied and
pasted’ on a group

To make sense out of this we need to
clarify what is ‘culture’ and what is ‘high-performance’. While there are multiple perspectives here
also, let us use the following as working definitions. A group is said to be
high-performing when it consistently achieves its goals. Culture is the ‘way we
do things around here’ – the recurring patterns of behavior in a group. If we
put these two definitions together, we can define a ‘high-performance culture’
as those recurring patterns of behavior in a group that enables the group to
consistently achieve its goals. So, the real question becomes ‘is there really a
set of such of behaviors that by itself lead to high performance of the group’?

If we have to understand the
functioning of groups, we have to look at both its hardware and software.
Hardware is the structure, policies, processes etc. Software is the people and
the culture. Often, problems at the hardware level get conveniently
misdiagnosed as software problems, because it is much easier to train people
and to run culture-building sessions as compared to making significant changes
in structure, policies and processes. So, if we have to have a high performing
group, both the hardware and the software have to be good and also in sync with
each other.

Most of the studies in the domain of
high-performance cultures list a set of characteristics and factors associated
with high-performance cultures. These characteristics and factors and their
relative importance vary across the different studies, Yes, sometimes they do
look like wish-lists and not like proven causal factors for high-performance
cultures. Nevertheless, it is instructive to take a look at them.

Some of the popular characteristics listed
are passion for excellence, shared understanding and buy-in to the organization
purpose, vision and goals, outward focus, decisiveness, sense of urgency, speed
and agility, sense of ownership and personal accountability on the part of all
the employees, discipline, diversity and inclusion, innovation and risk taking,
passion for learning and renewal etc. All these do seem reasonable. What is not
proved is whether these characteristics are causally linked to high-performance
or if they are just correlated with some of the high-performance situations.

Now let us look at the factors that the
studies on high-performance culture list as the ones responsible for
high-performance. They include high performance standards and benchmarks,
alignment of goals, high person-job fit, clarity of individual performance
goals coupled with real-time feedback, review and coaching mechanisms,
streamlined, and simplified processes and procedures, policies that enable and
not hinder performance, flatter organization structures, realigned competency
frameworks and incentive schemes to reinforce appropriate behaviors, high
degree of performance based differentiation in rewards, role modeling by the
leaders etc. Here again all these factors seem reasonable. But, they seem to be
part of any good performance management system and not something unique to
high-performance cultures.

May be, that exactly is the crux of the
issue. If these factors corresponding to good performance management are
coherently and consistently implemented, it will lead to high-performance. That
is, when these gets consistently done and get role modeled by the leaders, it
becomes ‘the way things get done’ and that is exactly the definition of culture
that we have been using! When these are also structurally reinforced by
appropriate structures, processes and policies they become sustainable. This
helps us to realize the true power and importance of performance management. The
performance management system, when properly designed and implemented, can be
the most effective culture building tool instead of being a collection of annoying
forms and formats!

Yes, spelling out what exactly is high
performance and what exactly is the target culture required in their particular
context would be helpful for a group to work towards high performance. High-performance
need not necessarily be relative. It is with respect to whatever goals a group
sets for itself though the group might refer to external performance benchmarks
before arriving at the its goals. Similarly, there is no one right blueprint for
culture as the culture that will lead to high-performance for a group will
depend on the group’s strategy, context and stage of evolution.

The most important thing here is to go
beyond broad statements of intent and empty platitudes. To make things we work,
we have to identify the few most important cultural characteristics that needs
to be changed and reinforced. We also need to keep in mind the
interrelationships, structural reinforcements and alignments. We must ensure
that the new cultural characteristics that we are trying to build is in
alignment with the core values of the organization. Another important enabler is
to remove impediments to high performance like ‘passive resistance’. All these,
when done consistently, becomes the way of life and hence fit to be called ‘culture’!

So where does this leave us? Yes, groups vary in terms of performance levels
and some of that variations in performance can be attributed to differences in
the patterns of behavior (culture) in the group. Since these groups function in
different contexts and with different goals, we can’t identify a single
blueprint for high-performance culture that will be valid across groups though
there could be some common characteristics and factors. Yes, in any group we
can examine the hardware and software of the group to see if they are optimized
and aligned for the achievement of the goals that the group has set for itself.
When we detect gaps in the same, steps can be taken to address the same. However,
these will often require fundamental changes in the functioning of the group
and that requires commitment and investment from the leaders for an extended
period of time. We must remember that what often differentiates a
high-performance culture is the intensity and rigor of the implementation and
not content of the culture! Unless the group is fully committed to the change,
in both letter and spirit, the changes can’t be implemented and sustained. After
all, a culture becomes real only when it is experienced!

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About this blog

This blog is an attempt to arrive at the simplicity that is achieved by working through/wrestling with the complexities in life and work. While most of the posts here are on topics on which I have some sort of expertise, some of the posts might reflect a tendency to 'rush in where angels fear to tread'! There could also be cases similar to that of an 'n' dimensional 'animal' trying to swallow an 'n+m' dimensional object. The views expressed here are my own and they don't necessarily reflect the views of my employers (past, present or future!).

About Me

Life at the intersection of theory and practice. Exploring the paradoxes and possibilities in Human Resources, Organization Development and Personal Effectiveness - using stories, myths and concepts from a wide range of fields